The Classical Historian and the Byzantgine Writer

A comparison of Book II, chapters xxii and xxiii of Procopius' History of the Wars with Book II, chapter v of Thucydides' Peloponnesian War demonstrates the influence the classical historian had on the Byzantine writer. The episodes of plague that attacked Athens and Byzantium are constructed in nearly identical fashion. Both provide extensive descriptions of the course of the disease: its geographic origins, symptoms, variations, and effects. Both establish themselves as eyewitnesses to most of the things they report. And both writers reflect on topics such as the futile efforts of the physicians and the effect of the plague on general morality, but leave it to others to explain the reasons why the terrible disease arose in the first place. Thucydides' account clearly provided a model for Procopius. But the resemblance between the two historians is not just superficial and the method of reporting the story of the plague also reflects their specific approach to history. Both historians, even though they found themselves in the midst of all the horrifying sights and suffering they describe, suppress the personal in their accounts and attain an almost clinical tone. The objectivity of their reports is a rhetorical strategy meant to establish the truthfulness and reliability of their accounts. Thus Procopius adopted not just Thucydides' style but his conception of history-writing as well.

The similarities between the two historians is not limited to their chapters on

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others suffering from it" (124). Procopius cannot make exactly the same claim. But in both histories the reader is struck at some point by the fact that the writers were in the midst of the horrifying scenes they describe. There is so seldom a break in the dispassionate tone in which they recount the events that the slightest intrusion of the personal has the effect of re-focusing the reader's attention on the first-person nature of the accounts. This happens with Thucydides' remark about being ill and when Procopius, mentioning the empty streets of Byzantium, suddenly makes a subtle alteration in tone and says "And if one did succeed in meeting a man going out, he was carrying one of the dead" (472). This forces the reader's attention onto the narrator. Why was he in the streets? Was he simply insatiably curious, or was he too carrying one of his own dead? It comes home to the reader in both instances that the writers who now adopt this cool tone could have been no less fearful for their lives than others in their cities and that large numbers of those they knew--friends, neighbors, professional acquaintances--must have succumbed to the disease. The potential starvation, the breakdown of order, and all the other horrors

Category: History - T